MS ACCESS, NULL, and '%'

Question

I am using a prepared statement to query my access database which contains personal data first name, last name, address, city, state, etc.... I allow the user to search the database by any of these fields (or any combination of them) by making the default values for any empty fields '%'. Here's my select statement.
stmt =conn.prepareStatement("SELECT * FROM Data1 WHERE first_name LIKE ? AND last_name LIKE ? AND city LIKE ? ....");
stmt.setString(1, firstNameField.getText()+"%");
stmt.setString(2, lastNameField.getText()+"%");
stmt.setString(3, cityField.getText()+"%");
This worked but didn't return a record if ANY of their values are NULL. So I changed my select statement to allow for NULL values.
stmt =conn.prepareStatement("SELECT * FROM Data1 WHERE (first_name LIKE ? OR first_name IS NULL) AND (last_name LIKE ? OR last_name IS NULL) AND (city LIKE ? OR city IS NULL) ....");
stmt.setString(1, firstNameField.getText()+"%");
stmt.setString(2, lastNameField.getText()+"%");
stmt.setString(3, cityField.getText()+"%");
This fixed that problem, but now it ALWAYS returns the records with NULL fields. I want it to only match NULL fields if the coressponding JTextField is left blank. Can anyone tell me a good way to do this?

Answer 1

How can I create it dynamically and still keep the
speed of a prepared statement??Unless you are doing block inserts in a loop you are probably not going to see any speed improvement anyways.
But as I said you can simply create all the combinations and then use an array to keep track of them.